PHIL478E

Prerequisite: PHIL170 or permission of the instructor. The truth conditions for material conditionals require that if the antecedent is false, the conditional is true. Suppose you didn't raise an eyebrow when you learned this. On this analysis, it's true that if you DID raise an eyebrow, the sun will explode! This course examines ways of tackling such so-called "paradoxes of material implication." We will focus on indicative conditionals (e.g., "If Oswald didn't kill Kennedy, someone else did"), and counterfactuals (e.g., "If Oswald killed Kennedy, someone else would have"). Other topics will include onditional speech acts and the psychology of conditional reasoning.